VisualArt
REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY AUGUST SANDER: PEOPLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 10 Jul ●●●●●
Anyone with an interest in art or history should immediately see an exceptional body of work by the photographer August Sander, currently on display at Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery. Sander’s life’s work was an epic project entitled ‘People of the Twentieth Century’, a ‘portrait’ of the society in which he lived consisting of photographs of people across the social strata of Weimar Germany. Sander self-consciously adopted a typological, pseudo-sociological approach, carefully structuring his project into broad groupings (such as ‘The City’), each made up of a series of portfolios. The photographs now presented as part of this project are a fraction of what Sander originally intended – up to 30,000 negatives were lost.
Sander captured Germany at a moment of extraordinary
flux, beginning in 1910 with images of farmers (from another age compared to the assured urban ‘New Women’ of the next decades) and ending in the mid 1940s. Each portrait is ascribed a title that reflects the subject’s job or role. Everyone had a place in Sander’s project: workmen, artists, industrialists, Nazis, students, the unemployed, political prisoners (including Sander’s son), soldiers, circus performers and persecuted people. Even the dead are included, as ‘Matter’. For every image that confirms a stereotype, there is another
that confounds it. Each portrait which seems to eloquently ‘speak’ of the subject’s life and experience, is accompanied by a concurrent sense that these are just images, which tell us little beyond the superficial facts – the person’s appearance and the pose that they adopted before Sander’s lens. For all of Sander’s attempts at objectivity, there is still a
sense of interaction between the sitter and the photographer. It is hard to imagine what Bernd and Hilla Becher and Diane Arbus would have produced without the model of Sander’s endlessly fascinating and complex work. (Liz Shannon)
REVIEW GROUP SHOW REARRANGE YOUR FACE Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, until Fri 8 Apr ●●●●●
Rearrange your face is a varied, painterly show exploring the theme of abstracting figuration as a common starting point for contemporary art. With comical disproportionate chairs made from wheelie bins and skilfully deconstructed portraits in earthy oils, the show presents three artists’ unique styles and interpretations of the human form.
Michael Bauer stands out most as an artist versed
in the use of oil-based mediums, creating post- cubist pieces that visually explore texture and facial features using richly glossed colours. Juxtaposing these shifting portraits is Charlie Hammond’s Sweat Painting series, which, at first glance, appears to lift much from Philip Guston’s burly male workers. The images soon adopt their own cartoonish language, however, depicting the sweat-stained armpits of angular bin men and toilers (aptly re-titled ‘Th£ Toil£rs’ and, descriptively, ‘Left Pit’).
Gabriel Hartley shapes paper and resin sculptures thinly crumpled onto coloured podiums, invoking dead monuments or mouldy structures, while his paintings, though colourful, depicting bathers idolising a by-gone modernism, seem too drenched in the art history they feed from. (Alistair Quietsch)
120 THE LIST 31 Mar–28 Apr 2011
REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY MARCUS ADAMS: ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHER The Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 5 Jun ●●●●● REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY CLAUDE CAHUN / SUE TOMPKINS Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, until Sun 17 Apr ●●●●●
The best Royal portrait ever was a line drawing gracing the cover of post-punk zine City Fun in 1981 to commemorate the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di. A classic image of the happy couple was waggishly reconfigured so the couldn’t-believe-his- luck fruitcake’s hand was stuffed into his doomed fiancée’s blouse, groping away like billy-o.
While something similarly disrespectful should accompany Wills and Kate’s forthcoming nuptials, there’s none of that in this handsomely displayed archive of the definitive Royal snapper, primarily because Adams ditched his subjects once puberty got the better of them. Instead we take a sepia- tinted tour through the birth of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, through to HRH’s own offspring Charles and Anne and a subsequent slice of the 20th century establishment en route.
The princesses seem to lose their sparkle as they get older, until the wonderful final shot of what could be any normal 1950s family at leisure. The overall effect is of wandering through a Poliakoff TV play: stately, regal and beautifully shot. (Neil Cooper)
Two female artists bridge the last two centuries in these contrasting but complementary shows. Cahun’s all-angles black and white photographs on the top floor of the gallery captures the artist’s striking singularity via a series of portraits that look like an early 20th century pre-punk template for equally studied images by Patti Smith. Downstairs, meanwhile, ex-Life Without Buildings chanteuse Tompkins expands her adventures with text-based pieces by utilising safety pins and other accoutrements into her palette. With her text pieces becoming increasingly minimal on paper at least, Tompkins performed her opus ‘Hallo Welcome To Keith Street’ in full at the show’s opening.
Reading from a thick swadge of paper scrappily bound in a folder, Tompkins gave a gleeful rendition of what sounds like a very personal set of free- associations, bippetty-boppitying about in front of the gallery’s lift over the piece’s full 40-minute duration. With Tompkins becoming an increasingly major figure in contemporary art, it’s refreshing to see such a force of nature in full throes of inspired rapture. (Neil Cooper)